1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to mail management in a computing system and more particularly to archiving mail content in a mail system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic mail, referred to in the art as e-mail, has proven to be the most widely used computing application globally. Though e-mail has been a commercial staple for several decades, due to the explosive popularity and global connectivity of the Internet, e-mail has become the preferred mode of asynchronous communications, regardless of the geographic separation of communicating parties. Today, more e-mails are processed in a single hour than phone calls. Clearly, e-mail as an asynchronous mode of communications has been postured to replace all other modes of communications excepting voice telephony.
Like other applications, regular database backups for an e-mail system allow for restoring the database to a previous state in the event of a catastrophic failure. For very large e-mail systems, however, backup and restoration can be expensive operations both in terms of time as well as in administrative overhead. Additionally, a restore operation is known not to be an efficient means to retrieve a particular message for an individual user.
Specifically, in large e-mail systems it is common to have many messages delivered to large recipient lists. Rather than duplicate the message content for each of the recipients, many mail systems adopt a ‘single copy’ strategy whereby only a single copy of the message data is maintained. E-mail for each designated recipient of a message can be tracked by means of a pointer to the message rather than maintaining separate copies of the message for each designated recipient Accordingly, backup and restore operations involve an intermediate step of reconciling message pointers.
There have been various approaches to providing a more efficient means of backing up individual user e-mail content from a single copy message store. Many approaches require backing up the e-mail content for each individual user independently rather than as part of the database backup. To do so, however, results in a second backup data store that fails to maintain the single copy model. Other problems can result as well including a potentially large increase in backup storage requirements; a significant administrative cost for generation and maintenance of these backups; and a challenge to restore the recovered e-mail into a single copy message store without creating duplicate copies of the data.